Hello Travis.
On 11/08/2013 03:42 AM, tjhowse wrote:
Hi Ladies and Gents,
I've built a three-node mesh network using cheap TP-Link TL-WDR3600 routers. They can do simultaneous 5.8GHz and 2.4GHz. I use the 5.8 for the backbone links between the nodes, and 2.4 to clients. The nodes are running OpenWRT and OLSRD.
This system mostly works well, but there are a couple of problems with it that I'm wondering if batman-adv would solve or make easier to solve:
- The backbone links cannot be better protected than WEP, a
limitation of OLSRD, 2) Gateway assignment is a manual process, which must be performed on every node in the mesh, referring to the single node connected to the WAN, 3) The manual gateway configuration of 2) prevents peer-to-peer communications between mesh clients, 4) Each node has its own /24 subnet. This causes problems when a device roams from one device's jurisdiction to another if the interface doesn't re-issue a DHCP request.
We're expanding the network, I've just bought another ten of these routers, and I'm going to spend some time assessing if batman-adv would be a better fit for our purposes. There will be a range of ios, android and windows devices connecting to the mesh.
My questions are as follows:
- Does batman-adv worth with WPA2 or better encryption?
Yes but you need some changes such as replacing wpad-mini by wpad and probably mac80211 and hostpad depending on which openwrt release you will be using to do all this.
- Must every client to a batman-adv mesh have a daemon installed?
Every node must have batman-adv
- Is it possible to separate different radio interfaces for different
purposes? I.E. 5.8 for backbone, 2.4 for clients.
Yes and you can even have VAP's
- Can all nodes and clients on a mesh have an IP in the same subnet,
solving some of the roaming problems caused by bad interface settings or drivers?
Yes.
Let me know about your progress regarding these changes if you encounter some issues because there are some and i have also being trying to solve them.
Thanks, Travis. .